


In Need of a Gardener

by LillysoftheValley



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Garden of Eden, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, To Be Continued
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:16:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24882172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LillysoftheValley/pseuds/LillysoftheValley
Summary: What the Dowlings really needed was a full time gardening staff of at least four, with additional help during the autumn for harvesting from the vegetable garden and the small orchard. Then there was the conservatory, which had been overgrown and shut up for several decades, but held the possibility of being used again if someone could devote the time to it. A proper English gardener, that's what the place needed.What they got was Brother Francis.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	In Need of a Gardener

**Author's Note:**

> An idea about gardening, and plants, and why Aziraphale is the gardener instead of Crowley. 
> 
> More a series of interconnected ideas than an actual story. I have plans for this piece, but it is firmly on the back-burner for the present. Updates, if any, will be sporadic. For now, enjoy this little selection and if anyone wants to play around with the idea, too, you are more than welcome and I'd love to see what you come up with!

_Highly recommended,_ that's what the letter of introduction said. _Absolutely indispensable. Particularly skilled with fruiting trees._ Well, the Dowlings didn't know anything about all that, but someone had to be brought on to do something with the estate greenery. And if he was offering, at what appeared to be a very reasonable rate, who were they to say no?

What the Dowlings really needed was a full time gardening staff of at least four, with additional help during the autumn for harvesting from the vegetable garden and the small orchard. Then there was the conservatory, which had been overgrown and shut up for several decades, but held the possibility of being used again if someone could devote the time to it. A proper English gardener, that's what the place needed.

What they got was Brother Francis.

And what Aziraphale really needed was to be on hand inside the house, to balance out Warlock's education and keep an eye on Crowley, but the wily demon had outfoxed him in that department (and had always been better with children, anyway). So gardener it was.

A daunting prospect, but Aziraphale didn't mind the work. It was a modestly large estate, scaled back sometime in the seventies from the original holdings, but it was not so vast that he felt overwhelmed. It would be a nice challenge, he decided, to tame the garden and Warlock's more demonic tendencies at the same time. And, to be honest, he had rather missed gardening.

When he had first been given the Eden assignment, his first deployment after -- well, after the thing he didn't like to think about -- Aziraphale had been more than happy to leave the regiment behind. Perhaps that was why he had been chosen, out of all the Principalities, to guard the Next Big Project. Perhaps he was simply being shunted out of the way. In any case, it was a nice change to be in the garden. Its wild and uninhibited growth was so unlike heaven. There were places to hide there, and the only rule seemed to be simply: Thrive. He had never been told just what he was supposed to be on guard for. The only hard line seemed to be that between Inside the garden and Outside the garden. Was he to keep things out, or keep the animals and plants in? She didn't tell him. _Guard the Eastern gate_ was all She had said, handing him the sword. So that was what he did. (Secretly, he had rather hoped he would never have to touch the thing again, but since he had already filled out all the paperwork, he was stuck with it).

Initially, there wasn't much _to_ guard. There was a wall, with gates, a nice close star to keep things warm and bright, and aside from one little seed planted in a little mound of this new thing called dirt, Eden wasn't much to write home about. But then, oh, but _then . . ._

He reflected later, once painting had been invented, that it was like watching a masterpiece being revealed stroke by tiny stroke. At first, the canvas seemed vast and empty. Then, with one touch, there was a trickle of something called water bubbling up from under the sandy soil and soon that trickle started to flow into a great river. This river carved a path through the earth that was completely unpredictable. It wasn't straight, aligned, or told which way to go. The river simply went where it pleased. Then, with a breath of something called wind, more seeds drifted into the garden. (Aziraphale never did find out exactly where they had come from). Those seeds, borne by a wind that also went where it chose in random eddies and gusts, found root in the soil nourished by the river. Before his eyes, the garden started to grow.

What was once bare soon became covered in little shoots of life, innumerable and each one unique. From up on the wall, it looked like a uniform blanket of what the humans would come to call green, but from down on the ground, right up close, Aziraphale found that there were different _kinds_ of these little green things. Stems and vines and leaves in all different shapes and sizes. Some grew faster than others, some taller, some up, some across, some even grew down. The amazing thing was, all that growth had been bound up inside a single seed, all special and unique, but each nourished by the same sun, the same water. It was a miracle, and Aziraphale wanted to know all he could about these new plants and how to care for them.

Since the assignment papers never specified that _he_ had to personally guard the gate, he left his sword to keep an eye on the place and set to work becoming the first gardener. _Know thy enemy,_ he reminded his fellow guards when they questioned him about it. They could not, he reasoned, do their jobs properly unless they knew what they were protecting. And there was so much to know. Just when he thought he was getting the hang of things, with another brushstroke there were animals to contend with. Suddenly, different things started happening with the plants. Blooms were pollinated, seeds spread, but on the whole, most of the plants were eaten. Sometimes this made the animals sick, sometimes they died, but sometimes if they ate something else, they got better. And the more they ate, the more they grew and the animals grew in much stranger and mysterious ways than the plants. (Strange to an angel, who had no experience with the concept of something being born). It was then that Aziraphale had to get his head around the idea of the plants being _used_ and that changed how he thought about the ways they grew.

He wasn't interfering, exactly. She had never told him he couldn't, at least. He was just -- exploring. Tinkering. Cataloguing. He liked doing that; knowing what a thing was and how it worked, collecting a store of knowledge. So he would walk about the garden and explore. Sometimes he would make a little change, dig up a plant from the shade and put it somewhere sunny, or move flowers that the butterflies liked next to some vegetables just to see what would happen. Sometimes the plants thrived, and sometimes they didn't, but it was all useful to know so he kept at it. Eventually, Aziraphale came to know quite a lot about just about every plant in the garden.

With one exception.

That first seed that had been planted that very first moment of that thing called day had grown like all the rest. It had been green, like all the rest, with leaves and a stem that turned into a trunk and flowers that turned into fruit. There were plenty of other fruit trees in the garden, but the fruit of this first tree was odd. It did not fall, for one thing, as ripened fruit did from the other trees. Nor did it rot. It simply waited, but for what he could not say. No one else knew, but no one else cared, so they didn't ask. Aziraphale didn't ask either, but there was no rule that said he could not be curious. (By the same token, he was not entirely sure there _was_ a strict rule about asking, but recent history of cause and effect was enough to make him refrain from inquiry).

Because the plant was odd, and his observation of it could only go so far, Aziraphale learned little about it. He could not, for example, see what happened when an animal ate the fruit, or the flowers, or the leaves, or the roots, because no animals would go near it. He could not discern if the buds required pollination, or by which insects, because the initial fruit never fell. He did not know if sun or shade was optimal because there were no other seeds, and the plant had since grown too large from him to move. In fact, of all the plants in the garden, this was the only one that was alone. All the others were numerous, spreading freely around the garden, mixing and mingling with each other to create even more plants. Only this tree was without partner, a solitary mystery in the center of Aziraphale's store of knowledge.

He had returned to his post, resigned to an incomplete index, and had barely picked up his sword again when the final brushstroke had completed the painting. After that, he didn't have time to think about the strange plant again until it was much too late to do anything about it.

Watching the humans took up all his attention. Now, at last, there was something he was sure he was supposed to protect. The animals he had watched over, of course, but they had a tendency -- like the plants, river, and wind -- to do as they pleased. There was little he could do if they flew over the wall, or burrowed beneath it, and he may be a Principality but he was not about to let those lions anywhere close to his corporation (not after what they did to the antelopes). If the animals wanted to leave, he didn't stop them. The humans, however, were supposed to stay _inside_ the garden. That was the Plan. So he guarded the gate, kept his distance, and watched them learn the way of the garden just as he had. They were infinitely curious, much more so than the other animals, almost as much as Aziraphale himself, and it made him glad. A lot of work had gone into Eden and at last here were creatures who could appreciate it. The learned quickly, and seemed to enjoy the process. Sometimes it was a bit frightening; more than once Adam tried something that didn't agree with him, and Eve had a tendency to get a little too close to the animals with the sharpest teeth, but on the whole the process of watching them grow and learn was pleasant. Aziraphale often wished he could teach them something of what he knew, but he got the feeling that _would_ be interfering. This world was something they would have to figure out on their own, for better or worse.

For a time, it was mostly better.

But then it was suddenly much, much worse. The mystery of the lonely tree was revealed, but at a terrible cost. Such is the price of knowledge, but he took a little comfort in the philosophy (as it would come to be known) that all knowledge is worth having.

After that, it was a very long time indeed before Aziraphale had anything to do with gardening.


End file.
